TELEVISION VIEW; For $64,000: Who Lost in the Big Fix?

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"The Quiz Show Scandal" recalls that in an era before Presidents had done much lying on television, trusting Americans were already being lied to by the shows they loved best. "The $64,000 Question," "21" and "Dotto" were among the tube's earliest and biggest hits, bringing money and celebrity to contestants, bonuses to producers, profits to advertising agencies and fortunes to sponsors. All were rigged.

The road to exposure, which caused much breast-beating in the 1950's, is clearly laid out on tomorrow night's edition of "The American Experience," at 9 on Channels 13 and 49 in the New York area. Linking individual motives to institutional pressures, the program casts an unkind light on much of commercial television.

Several survivors -- notably the "21" producer Daniel Enright, the prime mover in the most elaborate fraud, and Herbert Stempel, his Faust, return to tell their stories. Mr. Stempel, a somewhat pathetic figure, says he went along until he was compelled to lose to a more appealing competitor, the young Columbia University literature teacher Charles Van Doren, who appears only in clips that show him mopping his brow as he strains to answer questions that were fed to him before showtime.

Almost from the start, some shows had phony elements. The fancy I.B.M. sorting contraption on "Take It or Leave It" that was supposed to be spewing out random questions was in fact just producing a lot of cards with the same question. The bank executive who was introduced to viewers as the personification of fiscal probity, the uniformed guards, the "isolation booth" were all just scenery.

This well-told account emphasizes that sponsor pressure made it risky for producers to rely on honest games. A producer of "The $64,000 Question" tells of a message conveyed to him after a dullish show from Charles Revson, the head of Revlon: "That was Charlie. He thinks the Lincoln expert is boring; he wants you to stiff him." When exposure came, Mr. Revson denied knowing anything about anything.

At first, some producers just asked favored contestants lots of questions off camera and then fed back the ones they had answered correctly. One contestant, a specialist on the world's great lovers, says he was surprised the first time he was asked a question on camera that he had been asked earlier behind the scenes. He deduced, "It was a con game, a scam." Mr. Enright and Mr. Stempel tell how "21" was choreographed in all particulars, not just the answers but the pauses for recollection, the brow-mopping, the happy reactions.

Viewers thought they were watching a game. Producers knew they had to put on a show. The dramatic contrivances helped bring 50 million fans to their sets week after week. Movie attendance dropped on quiz-show nights, and it is said that even street crime went down. Take your choice: fraud on the tube or a mugging outside.

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With so many people involved, exposure was ordained. Rumors of finagling were already in the air when a standby contestant on "Dotto" picked up a notebook he had seen another contestant studying before going on the set. Hello! There were the answers to all the questions she was being asked.

Mr. Stempel, who was given the role first of a know-it-all nerd and then of a villain standing in the way of the appealing Mr. Van Doren, is oddly touching as he tells how painful it was for him to give the wrong answer to a crucial question: What movie won the Academy Award in 1955? He knew it was "Marty," a movie he especially liked, but he was not permitted to utter the word. All he wanted to do, he says, was play the game. But he had made his deal with Mr. Enright and had to live down to it: "I took my dive." When Mr. Stempel went public with his story, Mr. Enright, all indignation, called his protege mentally unstable. But by then the game was up.

Charles Van Doren became the sad central figure in the episode for the same reasons that Time magazine put him on its cover. Here was a teacher of literature, member of a distinguished literary family, proving to all the kids out there that knowledge could pay off. "No one wanted to believe he was guilty," says the narrator. He was billed, one producer recalls, as a model of "integrity and educational achievement." In him, the shows were personified and promoted as marriages of entertainment and edification.

Although the quiz scandals have never been repeated, television remains a money-driven, ratings-driven operation. And there is still the self-comforting pretension, displayed at all awards ceremonies, that it is a fount of good works.

If the program's narration gets a bit portentous ("The scandal left us feeling betrayed"), the story invites moralizing. Even when the whole business was coming unraveled, about 100 producers and contestants, middle-class folks with no particular criminal propensities, lied to a grand jury. The favored rationalization seemed to be that after all, this was just show business. But if the shows had lighted the way to education before they were revealed as fakes, what message was being sent out now?

The "us" who were left feeling betrayed were of course the fans whose desire for excitement made unfixed contests too chancy; the less appealing contestant might win. Given the laws inspired by the quiz-show revelations, chances are that "Wheel of Fortune," "Jeopardy!" and the other current quizzers are not cooked. But with the same pressures and incentives prevailing and the reach for ratings as relentless as ever, here's an easy multimillion-dollar question: Is much of television a long-running scandal?

A version of this review appears in print on January 5, 1992, on Page 2002031 of the National edition with the headline: TELEVISION VIEW; For $64,000: Who Lost in the Big Fix?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe